by Walker Percy
“It’s like Pompey!” she cried.
“Like what? Yes, right.”
We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delighted. Are you going to delight me? isn’t this the time? aren’t things falling out just right? Pleasing her is fathoming and fulfilling this expectation. Her face. Her cropped wheat-colored hair with a strong nap that aches my hand to brush against, her rather short tanned perfect legs drawn with strong simple strokes like the Draw Me girl in magazine contests. She’s poor, having left her West Virginia parents early and supported herself in civil service, worked in Bethesda for N.I.M.H. before transferring here. I can see her in Washington in the evening washing out her things in the washstand, keeping her budget, minding herself… . But she has her own views and likes. She opposes the war in Ecuador, subscribes to Playgirl, a mildly liberated, mildly Left magazine, and carries in her purse a pocket edition of Rod McKuen, a minor poet of the old Auto Age, which she likes to read aloud to me: “Don’t you just love that?” “Yes.” But what I love is her loving it, her faintly spurious love of loving things that seem lovable.
A turtle plopped into the pool.
“Can’t you just see them!” she whispered, swaying against me.
“Who?”
“All the salesmen and flappers.”
“Yes.”
“Aah!” said Moira, stretching out on a convex lounge which pushed her up in the middle. I perched somewhat precariously beside her.
Moira, who is twenty-two and not strong on history, thinks that the great motels of the Auto Age were the haunt of salesmen and flappers of the Roaring Twenties. Whereas, of course, it was far more likely that it was the salesman and his wife and kids and station wagon who put up here in the sixties and seventies.
A green lizard did push-ups on Moira’s lounge, blew out a red bladder. Moira screamed and hopped into my lap. We kissed. I kissed her smooth biscuit-shaped kneecaps. Her eyes were fond and faraway. “Just think,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s all gone. Gone with the wind.”
“Yes.”
“The lion and the lizard keep The courts where Samson gloried and drank deep.”
“Right.” I held her close, melting with love, and whispered in her ear: “The wild ass stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”
“Don’t be nasty!” cried Moira, laughing and tossing her head like Miss Clairol of olden time.
“Sorry.”
Taking my hand like a child, she led me exploring. In a rusted-out Coke machine in the arcade we found warm, five-year-old Cokes. I opened two, poured out half and filled the bottles with Early Times.
“This is how the salesmen and flappers used to drink.”
“Wonderful!” She took a big swig.
The hot sun blazed in the patio. We could not swim in the foul pool. So we sweated and drank Coke and bourbon like a salesman and a flapper. The Spanish moss stirred on the balcony. We went up to get the breeze. Then we explored the rooms, sat on the moldering bed in 203 and drank some more.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Moira thoughtfully.
“I fancy you. Do you fancy me?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s lie down.”
“On this? Ugh.”
“Then let’s sit in the chair.”
“Not today, Josephine.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring my Cupid’s Quiver.”
“Your what?”
“My sachet, silly.”
“I’m not sure I understand. In any case, I don’t mind.”
“I do.”
“Then let’s have a drink.”
Again she took a mighty pull. Again we kissed. Her gold eyes gleamed.
“Ugh,” she said again, noticing the graffiti and pudendae on the walls. Damn, why didn’t I clean the walls? But she refused to be shocked by dirty pictures. To prove it, we had to make a museum tour. Love, where is love now? We gazed at the poor penciled organs, same and different, same and different, like a figure in the wallpaper, and outside the swifts twittered down the sky and up sang the old skyey sounds of June and where was love?
So we walked hand in hand and read the graffiti. Moira had taken a course in semantics and knew there was nothing in dirty words.
Above the Gideon Bible: For a free suck call room 208.
Moira shook her head sadly. “What an unhappy person must have written that.”
“Yea. That is, yes.” Desire for her had blown my speech center. “Love, I, you,” I said.
“Love I you too,” she said, kissing me, mouth open, gold eyes open.
Holding hands, we read the graffito under The Laughing Cavalier: Room 204 has a cutout on her pussy.
“The poor man.”
“Yes.”
“What is a cutout?”
“It is a device salesmen used to attach to their auto mufflers.”
“But how—? Never mind. Ummm, what a good place for a picnic!”
“Yes.”
“Far from the maddening crowd.”
“That’s true.”
It was then that the notion occurred to me to fix the room up properly and spend a weekend here.
“Tom, do you remember that quaint little hotel in Merida?”
“Yes, I do.”
“There’s a small hotel. With a wishing well.”
“Right.”
“Remember the coins we threw in the fountain after our love and the wish we made?”
“Yes.”
She is right. I must remember that women like to think of the act of love as a thing, “our love.” There are three of us, like a family, Moira and I and our love.
“I wish you’d worn your Mexican pleated shirt.”
“Why?”
“You look just like Rod McKuen, if you had more hair.”
“He’s an old man.”
“No, he’s not. Look.” She showed me his picture on the back of her book, Rod hoofing it along a California beach, arms open to the sea gulls.
“That was twenty years ago.”
“Let’s have a picnic here.”
“We will.”
“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.”
“Yes, thou.”
9
That was last month. I’ve been working on this room ever since. Today I finish the job. No bowerbird ever prepared a bower for his love more carefully.
The hard work was done last week, Delco generator installed downstairs, hose run two hundred feet from the Esso station faucet up through the bathroom window.
Room 203 still has suspicious smells. Pull back curtains, open front panels and bathroom window to get a breeze. Unpack from doctor’s bag and line up on dresser: one saniflush, one wick deodorizer, one tube of cold solder, one roll of toilet paper, one boxed gift copy of Stanyan Street, one brass shower head, one jar of instant coffee.
Half an hour and my work is done, floors mopped, fungoid mattresses and horrid foam-rubber pillows slung over balcony rail to sun, coffee-maker restocked, graffiti wiped from wall revealing original hunt-and-hound design, Laughing Cavalier straightened, ancient color TV and bed vibrator plugged into Delco lead, shower head screwed onto hose from Esso station and tested (hot bitter hose water), Stanyan Street lined up with the Gideon.
Test vibrator: sit on bed and drop in quarter. Z-Z-Z-Z-Z goes the vibrator and suddenly I am thinking not of Moira but of Samantha, my dead daughter, and the times she and I and Doris used to travel in the Auto Age all over the U.S.A. and Samantha would explore the motel and drop coins in every slot. First off she’d have found the Slepe-Eze and fed it a quarter.
Tears spurt from my eyes. Removing a pint of Early Times from my bag, I sit on the humming bed and sip a few drinks.
Why does desire turn to grief and memory strike at the heart?
&nbs
p; 10
Off to town. Past empty Saint Michael’s Church and school, a yellow brick dairy-barn-with-silo.
Here I went to mass with Samantha, happy as a man could be, ate Christ and held him to his word, if you eat me you’ll have life in you, so I had life in me. After mass we’d walk home to Paradise through the violet evening, the evening star hard by the red light of the TV tower like a ruby and diamond in the plush velvet sky, and I’d skip with happiness, cut the fool like David while Samantha told elephant jokes, go home, light the briquets, drink six toddies, sing Tantum Ergo, and “Deh vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni and, while Samantha watched Gentle Ben, invite Doris out under the Mobile pinks, Doris as lusty and merry a wife then as a man could have, a fine ex-Episcopal ex-Apple Queen from the Shenandoah Valley. Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.
Cliff swallows are nesting in the fenestrated concrete screen in front of Saint Michael’s.
In this Catholic church, the center did not hold. It split in three, Monsignor Schleifkopf cutting out to the right, Father Kev Kevin to the left, leaving Father Smith. There is little to be said about Father Smith since he is in no way remarkable, having been a good and faithful if undistinguished priest for twenty-five years, having baptized the newborn into a new life, married lovers, shriven sinners, comforted the sick, visited the poor and imprisoned, anointed the dying, buried the dead. He had his faults. He was a gray stiff man. Like me, he was thought to drink and on occasion was packed off, looking only a bit grayer and stiffer than usual, to a Gulf Coast home for addled priests. Now he and his little flock are looking for a new home, I hear, having used for a while a Pentecostal church and later Paradise Lanes, my bowling alley here in the plaza, until it became too dangerous.
The plaza is empty now save for the rusting hulks of cars abandoned or burned in the time of troubles.
Five and a half years ago, on Christmas Eve, Paradise Plaza was sacked by Bantu guerrillas, foraying up out of the swamp. Store windows were smashed, the new Sears looted, some stores burned, cops shot up by Bantus, Bantus shot up by cops. Noncombatants fled, Christmas shoppers, storekeepers, motel occupants, drive-in movie patrons watching Homo Hijinks. Monsignor Schleifkopf left by the front door of the church, abandoning his burning Buick and golf clubs in the garage, where they are to this day. Nobody came back these five and a half years save lovers and bums and drugheads and in the end only the original denizens of the swamp, owls, alligators, and moccasins.
I should have known trouble was brewing. The night before, Leroy Ledbetter had kicked out a black couple from Tougaloo who wanted to bowl at Paradise Lanes. That very morning, walking to town, I met Nellie Bledsoe, who told me her cook had quit and she was ready “to shoot some niggers.”
“Eh? What? What’s that? My God,” I said, “you don’t mean you want to shoot some niggers because your cook quit.”
“Oh yes I do!” she cried, laughing and winking and kneading her arm. “Don’t you know what they do?”
“What?”
“They go on welfare and have their illegitimate nigger babies and get paid for it, paid more than they make working.”
“Yes, but you’re not saying that you’re going out and—”
“Oh yes I am!” says Nellie, winking and laughing. “Ho Ho Ho!”
Earlier the same morning, at six, a young jaundiced Bantu came up out of the swamp and appeared at my “enclosed patio” to be treated for liver flukes.
After I gave him his shot, he too winked at me with his yellow eye.
“I can’t pay you now, Doc, but since you’re so nice, we won’t shoot you when the shooting starts.”
“Who are you planning to shoot?”
“Anybody who gets in our way.”
“In the way of what?”
“In the way of our taking this goddamn parish, Doc,” he said, pulling out a copy of Fanon with one hand and patting a bulge under his coat with the other.
“My God, you’re not really going to shoot anybody, are you?”
“We’re taking over, Doc.”
“Why don’t you take over by the vote? You got the vote and there are more of you than of us.”
“Shit on voting, Doc.”
There was something in the air all right
11
On McArthur Boulevard now, a defunct parkway that deadends in a weedy lot and an ancient putt-putt course. Follow it as far as the L & N overpass and take the shortcut to town through Happy Hollow.
A bit shaky now, faintified but not hungry. The Early Times is not sitting well.
The thunderhead fills the whole eastern sky. A hot wind blows me toward it over the asphalt playground of the school. A chain rings against a flagpole.
The short cut turns out to be a mistake. Happy Hollow is a hot airless hole. The sun slants down like a laser. My stomach churns acid. When did I eat last?
The bare ground between the shacks and under the chinaberry trees never dries out. Where the sun does strike, the earth steams and gives off a smell of dishwater and chicken fat. Duck eggs rise in my throat.
But people seem happy here. Happy pot-bellied picaninnies play in the alley. Old folk rock on the porches. The unhappy young men are gone. The kindly old folk doff their caps politely. Yellow yarddogs lie chained to the chinaberry trees. They lift an eyebrow and snarl as I pass.
It is collection day. Up one side of the alley goes Moon Mullins collecting rent for his shacks. Down the other side goes old Mr. Jack Bourgeois collecting burial-insurance premiums. Both are cheerful and good-humored with their clients, exchanging jokes and pleasantries at each shack before moving on. Both collect in exactly the same way. If the householder is sitting on his porch, he will pass the time of day and hand down the money to the collector, who stands on the ground. If the porch is vacant, the collector will put his foot on the second step, rest an elbow on his knee and rap the porch floor with his knuckles, all the while looking down at the ground with a musing expression. Old Mr. Jack bangs the porch with his fat premium book.
The collectors greet me cordially.
“Hot enough for you, Doc!” cries Moon.
“How you doing, Doc!” cries old Mr. Jack.
“Yes, it is. All right,” I reply, weaving a bit
The Negroes greet me uneasily. Why do the yarddogs snarl at me and not at Moon and old Mr. Jack? I am unwell.
How will I get up the hill to town? The sun laser bores into the top of my head, but my feet are blocks of ice. If only I could make it to the Little Napoleon, where I could sit in a dark nook and drink a little toddy to settle my stomach.
Halfway up the hill it becomes clear I won’t make it Flowers of darkness are blooming in the weeds. Rank vines sprout in the path. In times of ordeal one’s prayers become simple. I pray only that I will faint in a private place where no one will disturb me and where especially Moon and old Mr. Jack won’t see me.
I have drawn abreast of the new animal shelter, a glass-and-concrete air-conditioned block of a building cantilevered from the hillside like a Swiss sanitorium.
My knees knock.
But here’s a good spot
I sit down in a dry ditch under a chinaberry whose dense branches come down and make a private place. It is next to the dog-runs that slope down the hill under the pines. Where are the dogs?
Something in the ditch catches my eye. It is a Garrett snuff can. I lean forward to pick it up and faint. Not keel over but settle down comfortably propping my head on my bag. The weeds smell like iron.
Where are the dogs?
12
Here are the dogs. Inside where it is cool.
When I come to, I am lying on the large-dog table in the treatment room of the animal shelter. I feel well but so weak I cannot lift my head. Delicious cool air bathes my forehead. A great blue surgical lamp shines straight down. When my eyes get used to the glare, I notice the dogs, several dozen glossy-coated curs, seated behind grills and watching with interested expressions. This is why the outside runs are empty: the dog
s have come inside to enjoy the cool breezes.
Gazing down at me, hands shoved deep in his pockets and fingering coins, stands Victor Charles. I know him without seeing his face. His fat abdomen engages the edge of the table. His belt buckle is to the side. The white duck is soiled by a horizontal streak I’ve seen before. Now I know where the streak comes from. It coincides with the metal edge of the table.
I try to get up.
“Hold it, Doc.” Victor places skilled large-dog hands on my shoulders.
I close my eyes. There is a pleasant sense of being attended, of skills being practiced, strong hands laid on, of another’s clothes rustling nearby.
I open my eyes. The lamp is reflected in one coppery highlight from Victor’s forehead. The rest of his face is blue-black. I notice that his sclerae are lumpy and brown.
“How long have I been here?”
“No more than fifteen minutes, Doc.”
“How did you find me?”
“I saw you sit down out yonder.”
“Were you watching me?”
“Watching you?”
“And you carried me in?”
Victor nods.
I am thinking: it is true. All day I have had the sense of being watched.
“Where’s my bag?”
“Right here, Doc.”
“O.K., Victor. Thank you. I think I’ll sit up.”
He helps me. I am well but weak.
“Eat this, Doc.”
Victor gives me a piece of corn bread and a cold glass of buttermilk. Though the bread is hard and unbuttered, it is very good. I don’t remember anything ever tasting better. The buttermilk slides under the acid.
“Thank you again.”
“You’re welcome.” Victor presses against the table and fingers his coins.
“I’ve got to go.”
“You ought to take better care yourself, Doc. And be more careful where you takes a nap.”
“Why?”
“Crazy folks everywhere now, Doc.”
“Folks? What folks?”
“Folks. You know.”
“You ought to be more careful too, Victor.”
